If it were possible that somebody could have my car, and I get to keep it, too, I would want as many people as wanted it to have a copy
That's easy to say when you've already got a car. If you have to go out and spend $20,000 to buy a car, are you going to be especially interested in copying it for all your neighbors you spent $0? Why should you be the one to take the entire $20,000 hit? Or are you going to sit and wait hoping that your neighbor shells out and you can be the one to get a car for free?
However, there are lots of things that take away a person's ability to make money.
Not really. There are pretty much only two things that take away a person's ability to make money: Them not being very good at their job, or someone taking things from them without paying. Of course "not being very good at their job" can encompass a lot of things (like not adapting to changing times, doing something risky and failing, and probably many other things) but all of that is under their control -- its their fault if they don't get it right.
On the other hand, if you take something from them they have no control over that loss of income. That's the major difference, and it applies to both physical goods (where the actual product is stolen) and intellectual goods (where the loss may only be a potential, but its still a loss when taken in aggregate as at least some of the potentials would likely have been purchases if the option to copy wasn't available.)
People sometimes make these things for fun, or as a hobby, or by commission from somebody who just wants them to exist
"Sometimes" is the operative word. If you can't make money on your music that doesn't mean you stop playing.. but it does mean you have less time to play since you'll have to have a real job as well. Copyright (and patents) was invented as a way to give authors and inventors a way to dedicate their full time to their passion rather than only an evening here and there between shifts at the mill or the mine or whatever.
the current copyright situation where Disney holds copyrights on things generations after the creator it is dead
And this is the problem. Its not that copyright is bad in principle -- it isn't. The problem is that we've redefined copyright from "reasonable compensation for my effort" to "mine mine give me everything its all mine!" Copyright is no longer reasonable in any sense of the word, and no longer really serves its original purpose of promoting the arts. It mostly now serves to pad the pockets of a handful of massive companies, regardless of whether they're promoting or hindering the development of new works.
Doom was successful because its 3D environment was leaps and bounds above its competition at the time. And they were building off their reputation from Wolfenstein which was also fairly advanced for its time and also was very successful (and Commander Keen before that wasn't exactly an unknown name either!)
id only started falling down a bit around the Quake 2 time when other companies had somewhat caught up and 3D gaming stopped making the huge leaps-and-bounds advances that JC was always at the forefront of. Obviously there's been lots of incremental improvements in the two decades since, but getting better-looking 3D worlds is nowhere near as important a change as jumping from 2D to 3D -- which id led the way on, at least in terms of mainstream gaming -- over the course of only 5ish years.
There was loads of shareware games back then. It was a very popular method of distribution (for both games and apps) in the days when a major form of advertisement was getting included on a magazine's included disk. But the percentage of super successful games is probably not much different than the percentage of super successful games in other eras when other modes of distribution dominated.
Let's see what the major dictionaries say for steal:
Merriam-Webster: to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully Well the word "appropriate" suggests depriving the victim of the thing, but its behind an "or" and "take" is a somewhat vague term in the context of intellectual property.
Oxford: Take (another person's property) without permission or legal right and without intending to return it. Again "take" is somewhat vague, but having no intention to return the thing suggests a thing that is returnable, which doesn't really apply to things you can copy.
Cambridge: to take something without the permission or knowledge of the owner and keep it
This one is entirely fixed on that term "take." That said, Cambridge' definition of the word "take" (unlike the other two) is more specific in that it in fact removes the thing.
All of these definitions start by assuming physical items, and they get somewhat vague and open to interpretation when you try to apply them to copyable goods. That is, you can't strictly say that copyright infringement isn't "stealing," because someone else might interpret those vague terms differently in such a way that it actually is a valid definition.
And that's ignoring the fact that language changes. Or are you using a live rodent move a cursor around a wooden desktop? I'm guessing not. Most likely you're using a computer mouse to move your cursor around a virtual "desktop."
If "stealing" or "piracy" start getting used in a new context that they didn't historically have well.. that's how things go and there's nothing you can do to stop it. Even dictionary maintainers have stopped trying to dictate language and are now more focused on recording language as its actually used in the real world.
So useless features, or awesome features that they'll remove next year.
integration with other Google products
That you can't avoid, even if you don't want integration (and god forbid you have say, two Google accounts -- its a giant crapshoot which one will be "active" at any particular time. Not that Google is the only company that doesn't believe you may want to do something like have separate work and personal accounts. Skype anyone?)
And I'm sure Hangouts won't be happy to accept the fact that I'd hidden chat a long time ago. It will jump back in my face and be as annoying as possible until I can figure out how to get rid of it again, since I use it exactly never nor do I have any need or desire to start using it.
I wish they'd just leave gmail alone. It used to be awesome.. and its still better than many mail systems.. but they seem determined to slowly degrade it. Maybe they're trying to find the tipping point where users won't put up with this kind of shit anymore.
This is the primary -- maybe even only -- part of your post that I have issues with. Trouble is, if its available somebody will eventually use it for evil. It only takes one asshat to ruin it for everyone.
Yep. That's why they want to catch people who do that. I'm just providing suggestions for how people could get away with it while not appearing immediately obvious to say a passing police officer. Having no plates at all is a pretty dead giveaway but having valid plates with expired insurance requires someone to look up that insurance in a computer (provided they haven't already pulled you over for some other reason.) Or having expired plates if the state in question doesn't make it extremely obvious when it was expired (not sure how all the various states handle that.)
In my parts we use stickers with the year and month and a rotating color scheme so that its obvious from a distance that you're driving with expired plates (well, unless you managed to get away with it for so long that the color has rotated back to whatever yours was! Then its only obvious to someone who's close enough to read the date text.) But I've seen people who find out the current color and put similarly-colored tape on instead of the sticker and things like that which again would be obvious up close but perhaps not from a distance -- the cameras would nab things like that easily since they can interface with a database a lot faster (and a lot safer) than a human police officer who's trying to drive at the same time rather than relying on the stickers (or whatever other tools your state uses for similar purposes.)
Innocence stops being assumed when you provide proof of guilt
There is never proof of guilt. There is only evidence of guilt. That's why we have judges and juries to make a decision.
That said, the bigger issue with these kind of traffic cameras -- or at least the bigger issue that people claim because "I just like speeding" (or in this case "I don't like paying for insurance") doesn't sound too good when you say it out loud -- is that they don't want to believe or trust that a picture from a roadside camera is sufficient evidence in itself to assign guilt. I mean they're wrong (I got caught by one once. There was little question that it was my car or me driving. And that was years ago with a crappy 640x480 camera.. it might have even been 320x240. With modern cameras it should be clear as day.)
Would you prefer your government to have 100% perfect information about you?
Well when they install the cameras, they already have significant information about you anyway. Whether or not you were fined.
That's the catch. There's nothing stopping those cameras from capturing every car that goes by (and indeed, they would have to do that at least temporarily in order to check the database for each plate that goes by.) But there's nothing stopping them from writing back to that database and simply keeping a permanent record of every car that went by. Which of course leads to the possibility of tracking everyone's movement (guilty or not) if they're able to query the database for "all points that plate number 123ABC was captured, with time stamps." That's the true problem people should be complaining about (and some are, of course, though mostly unheard.)
Science: "We need to stop polluting or we'll kill the planet!" Righties: "We won't give up profits unless you can prove 100% that you're right. Show us your test planet already!" Science: "That's kind of the problem we only got one to work with and we'd rather it still be here in 100 years." Whacko: "How about we spray glitter in the oceans and paint all the snow black?" Righties: "Cool. Don't see a problem there." Science: "But what about that whole 100% right issue?" Righties: "Who cares? Profitzzz!"... And yes, I realize that I'm using generalizations for those name labels. Live with it and try to read the point rather than picking nits, please.
DMV doesn't know if you have the compulsory insurance required to register your vehicle in many states
Of course they would. But they wouldn't know if you didn't bother registering your vehicle either. And while they may know when your insurance expires, they can't really stop you from driving at that point so even if they would have refused to issue you plates if you had no insurance.. once you've got those plates they can't really take them back.
Not to mention "many states" is not the same as "all states," so there's plenty of leeway in there for states where the DMV doesn't require proof of insurance.
The burden of proving innocence is always with the accused
No. Innocence is assumed. The burden of proving guilt is on the accuser. Or at least that's how it was supposed to be. We seem to be moving away from that ideal pretty rapidly these days unfortunately. Its just so much work to prove guilt and so profitable to assume it.
coverage for uninsured motorists. Personally this doesn't really affect me
Actually it does. This comes into play when you are in an accident that a) you weren't at fault for and b) the person who was at fault is uninsured.
That (a) part is particularly important -- your driving record and ability has little to no impact on whether somebody else fails to stop at a red light when you're in the intersection.
Without the uninsured motorist protection, a situation like that would end up with you basically footing the bill for an accident you didn't cause because your insurance company isn't going to pay for someone else' bad driving, and the at-fault driver is just going to tell you to go to hell. I mean you would still be able to sue them for damages but that could take a long time and assumes they have any money to pay the fines in the first place.
So its not quite the same as you paying a part of someone else' insurance -- if two uninsured people are involved in an accident then its entirely up to them to figure it out. There's no basic coverage for car insurance that everyone's paying into or anything like that.
And you don't understand the concept of responsibility. You do not have the freedom to be a menace to society, even in the US, because that "freedom" infringes on my right to life and happiness.
Even if you don't actually hit me with your car, if I have to go 3 miles out of my way just to avoid your shitty driving, you've infringed on my rights. As the old saying goes (and has been quoted here several times,) the freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose.
Licensing is a systematic way to a) ensure that you've been informed where your freedoms stop (ie: my nose) and b) provide a framework for enforcement because there's always some jackass -- possibly you, given your attitude -- who thinks my nose shouldn't be any concern of theirs and wants the burden of getting out of the way to be on me when they feel like swinging your fists around.
One thing licensing does not do is prevent you from doing whatever you want. And that goes for any kind of licensing -- driving, piloting, boating, even gun licenses.
The proper way to handle it then is to forbid them from exporting data that might be necessary for US retrieval (well, forbid them from deleting it from US servers -- I realize that caching and such would require copying across initially,) rather than waiting until after the fact and then trying to walk all over a sovereign country's laws.
Of course, unless there's some apriori definition of "necessary for US retrieval," this amounts to having to retain local copies of all data on US servers. Though I can't really fathom much reason to store US data (exclusively) on non-US servers except to try and skip around US data (anti-)protection laws.
Yep, I totally mistyped that. I meant it has little (no?) magnetic field due to little or no core movement which in turn indicates a cold core (at least, cold enough to not have a significant molten mantle for things to move around in.)
Probably makes the context of the rest of my comment a little less absurd!
Why is it so critical for our race to not go extinct?
In the grand scheme of things? Its not. In fact the universe will keep on turning even if all life everywhere was extinguished forever. The universe doesn't care about us. Or much of anything else for that matter. It just is.
In our own perspective though? We consider our survival a little more important than the rest of the universe does. It might not be "critical" but its certainly "highly desirable."
And of course if you're of the type, you could throw some God into the mix. Though he hasn't shown much more interest in human survival than the universe has. And really, he's God -- if the human experiment fails, he can just create a new race and try again. Hell for all we know, he already has and we're just not clever enough to notice it yet.
No serious person would suggest creating an atmosphere these days. Maybe they would have in the 50s or 60s but our knowledge of the planet (and in particular its lack of magnetosphere as you mentioned) has improved a lot since then.
For everything else though, much of it does depend on us being able to find and refine minerals and ores on the planet. It might not be a Home Depot, but it should allow a colony to be plenty self-sufficient if we can figure that one out, in the same way that they didn't ship all materials forever from Europe when they discovered the new world. We just learned to work with what was here when we arrived for the most part. (Of course in that case, we had natives to help show us the way.. On Mars we're going to have to rely entirely on science. But luckily, science is a lot better now than it was in the 15th century.)
They'd need a way to protect the atmosphere from solar wind and other dissipation mechanics before that would even be a relevant consideration. Pumping O2 or CO2 into the Martian atmosphere would quickly be equivalent to pumping it into space, and not especially useful.
Big problem is that Mars has essentially no gravitational field, which we presume is due to its core having cooled enough that its basically solid and not rotating. There's not really anything we can do about that. Bad movies aside, we don't really have a way to recharge a planet's core.
I did see a suggestion somewhere that we could build a really powerful magnet, put it in a spaceship and have it sit between Mars and the sun, with the idea that it would deflect a wide enough cone of solar wind to effectively protect the planet in the same way that a natural magnetic field would (I guess sans the auroras.) Of course, exactly how to build, launch and maintain such a ship was an exercise left to the reader:P..
Sigh. Another "copyright infringement isn't theft!" ramble. Yes, you're technically correct. No, nobody gives a shit about the specific terminology used. If they make that mixup in an official legal scenario (new laws, court proceedings, etc) then clarifying is definitely a good idea. But some random news reporter? Yeah doesn't really matter.
That said, this isn't even the typical piracy rant. This is like a meta-piracy rant. People download shows and therefore the don't watch them on cable TV, so the cable provider's advertisers stop paying to show their ads. Is the theory. I mean it completely ignores all of the other reasons people don't bother with cable TV anymore (high prices, low quality, Netflix exists, etc.)
I mean if they wanted to do something more useful than just whining, they could say.. set up their own streaming service. Charge maybe $5/mo with ads and have a $15/mo no ads tier or something. Of course they'd have to get a green light from Fox and whoever else supplies them with the shows in the first place (and I admit, that probably wouldn't be easy as Fox and other studios tend to like reveling in the 80s as well) but they could at least attempt to modernize rather than just crying about the world changing around them.
Even without the internet, I see little purpose to delaying distribution. Maybe with DVDs because of varying regional prices and not wanting say, American buyers to purchase their DVDs from South Africa for $2 rather than the $25 they charge at home (though customs officials have been watching for that kind of thing for years now anyway.. for better or worse.)
But theater releases and TV broadcast? What's the point? Most companies from what I've seen want all the dollars right this second and to hell with the future. So why is this the one instance where they decide that absurdly long delays are useful? I just don't get it.
A politically convenient excuse for what? You don't really need much of an excuse to implement a surveillance bill these days. Just follow in the footsteps of the UK and the US and ignore your populace when they complain. Everybody's doing it!
This is what the Soviet government did to their people
I'm not saying oppressive laws aren't a problem. I'm saying that using Fukushima and arbitrary "media blackouts" 6 years after the fact would be both strange and unnecessary.
This is about how long the Australian amendments took to become permanent law
Kind of irrelevant. A bill for modifying corporate tax rates or something similarly mundane.. well whatever 6 years is OK. Something time-critical like a media blackout would need to be implemented nearly instantly or it will be irrelevant. If they put in a media blackout today (and didn't have one for the past 6 years) then we would already have 6 years of reports circulating. Way, way, way too late to put the cat in the bag. Which indicates either a) they already have one (and thus don't need another one) or b) they don't have one (and thus implementing one now would be useless to the point of stupid.)
I wanted to find out what was on the list.
Probably a whole stack of random grievances that some MP or other had and other MPs didn't care enough about to veto. Some of them will be stupid (but make for more amusing headlines, so we hear about them a lot) but most will fairly straightforward -- at least in the context of reducing your worldview to the logic of "Me good, everyone else bad."
A great politician can get a crowd to applaud his incompetence as he takes away their freedom.
Or we could have our current set of politicians just take away your freedom and tell you to piss off when you don't like it. I mean its not like you can really do anything about it except for try to vote them out next election (and probably replace them with someone just as bad.) Western militaries would flat out stomp any civilian uprising if it came to that (even in the gun-loving USA,) and the world would have to change significantly before that power dynamic shifts to any great extent.
We're living in the greatest time in human history. And there's a lot of people doing their damnedest to reverse that trend.
Yes. In fact that's exactly my point. Its been ongoing for 6 years. So why would they need a law to blackout media coverage now rather than 6 years ago? I mean maybe they did have one 6 years ago and there really is a conspiracy. I don't buy it but I'm not going to claim its impossible either.
That still doesn't explain why they'd need a new blackout law now, or why they'd bother using that as an excuse for a surveillance bill when the whole world is implementing surveillance bills without having to refer to nuclear disasters. I mean this new Japanese bill might be a bit silly and over the top (like most things Japanese!) but its hardly out of place in the current global political environment.
That's kind of the issue. I don't know if TT really has the parent's logic in mind, but if they do then this would be exactly what they're concerned with: How can you make a "better" game when any improvements you add are immediately back-ported to the prior game by third parties you have no control over? I mean I'm sure there's some limits to what modders can do, but how much of a gap would TT have to jump in order to be so definitively unique that modders couldn't clone it, while at the same time still retaining the general theme and style of the series?
somehow, copies of the game still sell, despite the prevalence of modders
And I'm sure GTA5 would still sell some copies. But they don't want to sell "some copies" of an old game (that are probably discounted due to age on top of everything else.) They want to get that several-million-copy full-price spike that only really happens for a brand new game.
Not that I particularly agree with their decision here.. fans of a series are usually pretty quick to pick up the next iteration whether it deserves to be picked up or not -- sequels rely on that fact at the best of times. And they're taking a pretty big risk in pissing off their fans.. even if (perhaps especially if) the modding community is a small fraction of their player base, the Martha Stewart effect could cause the whole situation to blow up in their face.
the government and olympic officials don't want anyone talking about the toxic radionuclides that have been distributed over Tokyo
I somehow doubt you need to invoke a conspiracy theory at this point to explain either the Olympics being a security boondoggle, nor a right-wing government imposing ridiculous laws in the name of fighting terrorism. Its happening all over the world, Fukushima or not.
Never mind the fact that the Fukushima disaster was 6 years ago. Which would make them about 6 years too late to bother implementing blackout laws. That means its either not nearly as big of a coverup as you're wanting to believe, or it is a big coverup and existing blackout laws have been working fine. Either way, there is no need to try and use a 2011 disaster to justify a 2017 surveillance bill when there's so many other juicy pseudo-justifications to use.
it seems incredibly difficult to find the text of Japanese laws.
Try http://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/?re=02. I don't know the lag time on the translations though so I can't say how long it will be before this specific law is up. But if you know Japanese, you can go straight to the Ministry of Justice page and I imagine with some digging could find the original Japanese text as well. It would certainly be easier if any of the news sources would bother including the Japanese name for the bill though.
I wonder how long the illusion that these acts of government are in place to serve the people can be maintained.
Sadly, if we look at history this can be a very long time. All it takes is the right propaganda to convince people that you're serving them, and terrorism has given governments around the world a very deep well to draw such propaganda from, as we're all terrified of being the victim of an attack (even though statistically we're far more likely to be done in by a car accident or a peanut allergy or a lightning strike or any of a few dozen other things.)
I wonder when freedom and liberty will stop mattering entirely.
For all? Not sure that's ever existed, though if it did it kind of died out in the McCarthy era and the continual "war" on nouns (communism, crime, drugs, terrorism.. probably missing one or two in there,) and while liberty has rallied a couple times since then, it hasn't really revived. We're pretty good at inventing reasons to oppress people.
Of course that's just in the US. If you take a larger view of the world, there's definitely always been places where freedom and liberty have been unknown concepts for generations.
Slashdot Mirror
If it were possible that somebody could have my car, and I get to keep it, too, I would want as many people as wanted it to have a copy
That's easy to say when you've already got a car. If you have to go out and spend $20,000 to buy a car, are you going to be especially interested in copying it for all your neighbors you spent $0? Why should you be the one to take the entire $20,000 hit? Or are you going to sit and wait hoping that your neighbor shells out and you can be the one to get a car for free?
However, there are lots of things that take away a person's ability to make money.
Not really. There are pretty much only two things that take away a person's ability to make money: Them not being very good at their job, or someone taking things from them without paying. Of course "not being very good at their job" can encompass a lot of things (like not adapting to changing times, doing something risky and failing, and probably many other things) but all of that is under their control -- its their fault if they don't get it right.
On the other hand, if you take something from them they have no control over that loss of income. That's the major difference, and it applies to both physical goods (where the actual product is stolen) and intellectual goods (where the loss may only be a potential, but its still a loss when taken in aggregate as at least some of the potentials would likely have been purchases if the option to copy wasn't available.)
People sometimes make these things for fun, or as a hobby, or by commission from somebody who just wants them to exist
"Sometimes" is the operative word. If you can't make money on your music that doesn't mean you stop playing.. but it does mean you have less time to play since you'll have to have a real job as well. Copyright (and patents) was invented as a way to give authors and inventors a way to dedicate their full time to their passion rather than only an evening here and there between shifts at the mill or the mine or whatever.
the current copyright situation where Disney holds copyrights on things generations after the creator it is dead
And this is the problem. Its not that copyright is bad in principle -- it isn't. The problem is that we've redefined copyright from "reasonable compensation for my effort" to "mine mine give me everything its all mine!" Copyright is no longer reasonable in any sense of the word, and no longer really serves its original purpose of promoting the arts. It mostly now serves to pad the pockets of a handful of massive companies, regardless of whether they're promoting or hindering the development of new works.
Doom was successful because its 3D environment was leaps and bounds above its competition at the time. And they were building off their reputation from Wolfenstein which was also fairly advanced for its time and also was very successful (and Commander Keen before that wasn't exactly an unknown name either!)
id only started falling down a bit around the Quake 2 time when other companies had somewhat caught up and 3D gaming stopped making the huge leaps-and-bounds advances that JC was always at the forefront of. Obviously there's been lots of incremental improvements in the two decades since, but getting better-looking 3D worlds is nowhere near as important a change as jumping from 2D to 3D -- which id led the way on, at least in terms of mainstream gaming -- over the course of only 5ish years.
There was loads of shareware games back then. It was a very popular method of distribution (for both games and apps) in the days when a major form of advertisement was getting included on a magazine's included disk. But the percentage of super successful games is probably not much different than the percentage of super successful games in other eras when other modes of distribution dominated.
Let's see what the major dictionaries say for steal:
Merriam-Webster: to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully
Well the word "appropriate" suggests depriving the victim of the thing, but its behind an "or" and "take" is a somewhat vague term in the context of intellectual property.
Oxford: Take (another person's property) without permission or legal right and without intending to return it.
Again "take" is somewhat vague, but having no intention to return the thing suggests a thing that is returnable, which doesn't really apply to things you can copy.
Cambridge: to take something without the permission or knowledge of the owner and keep it
This one is entirely fixed on that term "take." That said, Cambridge' definition of the word "take" (unlike the other two) is more specific in that it in fact removes the thing.
All of these definitions start by assuming physical items, and they get somewhat vague and open to interpretation when you try to apply them to copyable goods. That is, you can't strictly say that copyright infringement isn't "stealing," because someone else might interpret those vague terms differently in such a way that it actually is a valid definition.
And that's ignoring the fact that language changes. Or are you using a live rodent move a cursor around a wooden desktop? I'm guessing not. Most likely you're using a computer mouse to move your cursor around a virtual "desktop."
If "stealing" or "piracy" start getting used in a new context that they didn't historically have well.. that's how things go and there's nothing you can do to stop it. Even dictionary maintainers have stopped trying to dictate language and are now more focused on recording language as its actually used in the real world.
Given Google's history:
better features
So useless features, or awesome features that they'll remove next year.
integration with other Google products
That you can't avoid, even if you don't want integration (and god forbid you have say, two Google accounts -- its a giant crapshoot which one will be "active" at any particular time. Not that Google is the only company that doesn't believe you may want to do something like have separate work and personal accounts. Skype anyone?)
And I'm sure Hangouts won't be happy to accept the fact that I'd hidden chat a long time ago. It will jump back in my face and be as annoying as possible until I can figure out how to get rid of it again, since I use it exactly never nor do I have any need or desire to start using it.
I wish they'd just leave gmail alone. It used to be awesome.. and its still better than many mail systems.. but they seem determined to slowly degrade it. Maybe they're trying to find the tipping point where users won't put up with this kind of shit anymore.
Information can be used for good or evil.
This is the primary -- maybe even only -- part of your post that I have issues with. Trouble is, if its available somebody will eventually use it for evil. It only takes one asshat to ruin it for everyone.
And yours, mine.
Isn't that also illegal?
Yep. That's why they want to catch people who do that. I'm just providing suggestions for how people could get away with it while not appearing immediately obvious to say a passing police officer. Having no plates at all is a pretty dead giveaway but having valid plates with expired insurance requires someone to look up that insurance in a computer (provided they haven't already pulled you over for some other reason.) Or having expired plates if the state in question doesn't make it extremely obvious when it was expired (not sure how all the various states handle that.)
In my parts we use stickers with the year and month and a rotating color scheme so that its obvious from a distance that you're driving with expired plates (well, unless you managed to get away with it for so long that the color has rotated back to whatever yours was! Then its only obvious to someone who's close enough to read the date text.) But I've seen people who find out the current color and put similarly-colored tape on instead of the sticker and things like that which again would be obvious up close but perhaps not from a distance -- the cameras would nab things like that easily since they can interface with a database a lot faster (and a lot safer) than a human police officer who's trying to drive at the same time rather than relying on the stickers (or whatever other tools your state uses for similar purposes.)
Innocence stops being assumed when you provide proof of guilt
There is never proof of guilt. There is only evidence of guilt. That's why we have judges and juries to make a decision.
That said, the bigger issue with these kind of traffic cameras -- or at least the bigger issue that people claim because "I just like speeding" (or in this case "I don't like paying for insurance") doesn't sound too good when you say it out loud -- is that they don't want to believe or trust that a picture from a roadside camera is sufficient evidence in itself to assign guilt. I mean they're wrong (I got caught by one once. There was little question that it was my car or me driving. And that was years ago with a crappy 640x480 camera.. it might have even been 320x240. With modern cameras it should be clear as day.)
Would you prefer your government to have 100% perfect information about you?
Well when they install the cameras, they already have significant information about you anyway. Whether or not you were fined.
That's the catch. There's nothing stopping those cameras from capturing every car that goes by (and indeed, they would have to do that at least temporarily in order to check the database for each plate that goes by.) But there's nothing stopping them from writing back to that database and simply keeping a permanent record of every car that went by. Which of course leads to the possibility of tracking everyone's movement (guilty or not) if they're able to query the database for "all points that plate number 123ABC was captured, with time stamps." That's the true problem people should be complaining about (and some are, of course, though mostly unheard.)
Science: "We need to stop polluting or we'll kill the planet!" ... And yes, I realize that I'm using generalizations for those name labels. Live with it and try to read the point rather than picking nits, please.
Righties: "We won't give up profits unless you can prove 100% that you're right. Show us your test planet already!"
Science: "That's kind of the problem we only got one to work with and we'd rather it still be here in 100 years."
Whacko: "How about we spray glitter in the oceans and paint all the snow black?"
Righties: "Cool. Don't see a problem there."
Science: "But what about that whole 100% right issue?"
Righties: "Who cares? Profitzzz!"
DMV doesn't know if you have the compulsory insurance required to register your vehicle in many states
Of course they would. But they wouldn't know if you didn't bother registering your vehicle either. And while they may know when your insurance expires, they can't really stop you from driving at that point so even if they would have refused to issue you plates if you had no insurance.. once you've got those plates they can't really take them back.
Not to mention "many states" is not the same as "all states," so there's plenty of leeway in there for states where the DMV doesn't require proof of insurance.
The burden of proving innocence is always with the accused
No. Innocence is assumed. The burden of proving guilt is on the accuser. Or at least that's how it was supposed to be. We seem to be moving away from that ideal pretty rapidly these days unfortunately. Its just so much work to prove guilt and so profitable to assume it.
coverage for uninsured motorists. Personally this doesn't really affect me
Actually it does. This comes into play when you are in an accident that a) you weren't at fault for and b) the person who was at fault is uninsured.
That (a) part is particularly important -- your driving record and ability has little to no impact on whether somebody else fails to stop at a red light when you're in the intersection.
Without the uninsured motorist protection, a situation like that would end up with you basically footing the bill for an accident you didn't cause because your insurance company isn't going to pay for someone else' bad driving, and the at-fault driver is just going to tell you to go to hell. I mean you would still be able to sue them for damages but that could take a long time and assumes they have any money to pay the fines in the first place.
So its not quite the same as you paying a part of someone else' insurance -- if two uninsured people are involved in an accident then its entirely up to them to figure it out. There's no basic coverage for car insurance that everyone's paying into or anything like that.
And you don't understand the concept of responsibility. You do not have the freedom to be a menace to society, even in the US, because that "freedom" infringes on my right to life and happiness.
Even if you don't actually hit me with your car, if I have to go 3 miles out of my way just to avoid your shitty driving, you've infringed on my rights. As the old saying goes (and has been quoted here several times,) the freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose.
Licensing is a systematic way to a) ensure that you've been informed where your freedoms stop (ie: my nose) and b) provide a framework for enforcement because there's always some jackass -- possibly you, given your attitude -- who thinks my nose shouldn't be any concern of theirs and wants the burden of getting out of the way to be on me when they feel like swinging your fists around.
One thing licensing does not do is prevent you from doing whatever you want. And that goes for any kind of licensing -- driving, piloting, boating, even gun licenses.
The proper way to handle it then is to forbid them from exporting data that might be necessary for US retrieval (well, forbid them from deleting it from US servers -- I realize that caching and such would require copying across initially,) rather than waiting until after the fact and then trying to walk all over a sovereign country's laws.
Of course, unless there's some apriori definition of "necessary for US retrieval," this amounts to having to retain local copies of all data on US servers. Though I can't really fathom much reason to store US data (exclusively) on non-US servers except to try and skip around US data (anti-)protection laws.
So what you're saying is that you "stole" $987 from that poor laptop manufacturing company? You bastard!
Yep, I totally mistyped that. I meant it has little (no?) magnetic field due to little or no core movement which in turn indicates a cold core (at least, cold enough to not have a significant molten mantle for things to move around in.)
Probably makes the context of the rest of my comment a little less absurd!
Why is it so critical for our race to not go extinct?
In the grand scheme of things? Its not. In fact the universe will keep on turning even if all life everywhere was extinguished forever. The universe doesn't care about us. Or much of anything else for that matter. It just is.
In our own perspective though? We consider our survival a little more important than the rest of the universe does. It might not be "critical" but its certainly "highly desirable."
And of course if you're of the type, you could throw some God into the mix. Though he hasn't shown much more interest in human survival than the universe has. And really, he's God -- if the human experiment fails, he can just create a new race and try again. Hell for all we know, he already has and we're just not clever enough to notice it yet.
No serious person would suggest creating an atmosphere these days. Maybe they would have in the 50s or 60s but our knowledge of the planet (and in particular its lack of magnetosphere as you mentioned) has improved a lot since then.
For everything else though, much of it does depend on us being able to find and refine minerals and ores on the planet. It might not be a Home Depot, but it should allow a colony to be plenty self-sufficient if we can figure that one out, in the same way that they didn't ship all materials forever from Europe when they discovered the new world. We just learned to work with what was here when we arrived for the most part. (Of course in that case, we had natives to help show us the way.. On Mars we're going to have to rely entirely on science. But luckily, science is a lot better now than it was in the 15th century.)
They'd need a way to protect the atmosphere from solar wind and other dissipation mechanics before that would even be a relevant consideration. Pumping O2 or CO2 into the Martian atmosphere would quickly be equivalent to pumping it into space, and not especially useful.
Big problem is that Mars has essentially no gravitational field, which we presume is due to its core having cooled enough that its basically solid and not rotating. There's not really anything we can do about that. Bad movies aside, we don't really have a way to recharge a planet's core.
I did see a suggestion somewhere that we could build a really powerful magnet, put it in a spaceship and have it sit between Mars and the sun, with the idea that it would deflect a wide enough cone of solar wind to effectively protect the planet in the same way that a natural magnetic field would (I guess sans the auroras.) Of course, exactly how to build, launch and maintain such a ship was an exercise left to the reader :P..
You pay $$$ for crappy pirated versions? I think you aren't doing it right :-/..
Sigh. Another "copyright infringement isn't theft!" ramble. Yes, you're technically correct. No, nobody gives a shit about the specific terminology used. If they make that mixup in an official legal scenario (new laws, court proceedings, etc) then clarifying is definitely a good idea. But some random news reporter? Yeah doesn't really matter.
That said, this isn't even the typical piracy rant. This is like a meta-piracy rant. People download shows and therefore the don't watch them on cable TV, so the cable provider's advertisers stop paying to show their ads. Is the theory. I mean it completely ignores all of the other reasons people don't bother with cable TV anymore (high prices, low quality, Netflix exists, etc.)
I mean if they wanted to do something more useful than just whining, they could say.. set up their own streaming service. Charge maybe $5/mo with ads and have a $15/mo no ads tier or something. Of course they'd have to get a green light from Fox and whoever else supplies them with the shows in the first place (and I admit, that probably wouldn't be easy as Fox and other studios tend to like reveling in the 80s as well) but they could at least attempt to modernize rather than just crying about the world changing around them.
Even without the internet, I see little purpose to delaying distribution. Maybe with DVDs because of varying regional prices and not wanting say, American buyers to purchase their DVDs from South Africa for $2 rather than the $25 they charge at home (though customs officials have been watching for that kind of thing for years now anyway.. for better or worse.)
But theater releases and TV broadcast? What's the point? Most companies from what I've seen want all the dollars right this second and to hell with the future. So why is this the one instance where they decide that absurdly long delays are useful? I just don't get it.
I see it as a politically convenient excuse
A politically convenient excuse for what? You don't really need much of an excuse to implement a surveillance bill these days. Just follow in the footsteps of the UK and the US and ignore your populace when they complain. Everybody's doing it!
This is what the Soviet government did to their people
I'm not saying oppressive laws aren't a problem. I'm saying that using Fukushima and arbitrary "media blackouts" 6 years after the fact would be both strange and unnecessary.
This is about how long the Australian amendments took to become permanent law
Kind of irrelevant. A bill for modifying corporate tax rates or something similarly mundane.. well whatever 6 years is OK. Something time-critical like a media blackout would need to be implemented nearly instantly or it will be irrelevant. If they put in a media blackout today (and didn't have one for the past 6 years) then we would already have 6 years of reports circulating. Way, way, way too late to put the cat in the bag. Which indicates either a) they already have one (and thus don't need another one) or b) they don't have one (and thus implementing one now would be useless to the point of stupid.)
I wanted to find out what was on the list.
Probably a whole stack of random grievances that some MP or other had and other MPs didn't care enough about to veto. Some of them will be stupid (but make for more amusing headlines, so we hear about them a lot) but most will fairly straightforward -- at least in the context of reducing your worldview to the logic of "Me good, everyone else bad."
A great politician can get a crowd to applaud his incompetence as he takes away their freedom.
Or we could have our current set of politicians just take away your freedom and tell you to piss off when you don't like it. I mean its not like you can really do anything about it except for try to vote them out next election (and probably replace them with someone just as bad.) Western militaries would flat out stomp any civilian uprising if it came to that (even in the gun-loving USA,) and the world would have to change significantly before that power dynamic shifts to any great extent.
We're living in the greatest time in human history. And there's a lot of people doing their damnedest to reverse that trend.
Yes. In fact that's exactly my point. Its been ongoing for 6 years. So why would they need a law to blackout media coverage now rather than 6 years ago? I mean maybe they did have one 6 years ago and there really is a conspiracy. I don't buy it but I'm not going to claim its impossible either.
That still doesn't explain why they'd need a new blackout law now, or why they'd bother using that as an excuse for a surveillance bill when the whole world is implementing surveillance bills without having to refer to nuclear disasters. I mean this new Japanese bill might be a bit silly and over the top (like most things Japanese!) but its hardly out of place in the current global political environment.
By *gasp* making a better game.
That's kind of the issue. I don't know if TT really has the parent's logic in mind, but if they do then this would be exactly what they're concerned with: How can you make a "better" game when any improvements you add are immediately back-ported to the prior game by third parties you have no control over? I mean I'm sure there's some limits to what modders can do, but how much of a gap would TT have to jump in order to be so definitively unique that modders couldn't clone it, while at the same time still retaining the general theme and style of the series?
somehow, copies of the game still sell, despite the prevalence of modders
And I'm sure GTA5 would still sell some copies. But they don't want to sell "some copies" of an old game (that are probably discounted due to age on top of everything else.) They want to get that several-million-copy full-price spike that only really happens for a brand new game.
Not that I particularly agree with their decision here.. fans of a series are usually pretty quick to pick up the next iteration whether it deserves to be picked up or not -- sequels rely on that fact at the best of times. And they're taking a pretty big risk in pissing off their fans.. even if (perhaps especially if) the modding community is a small fraction of their player base, the Martha Stewart effect could cause the whole situation to blow up in their face.
the government and olympic officials don't want anyone talking about the toxic radionuclides that have been distributed over Tokyo
I somehow doubt you need to invoke a conspiracy theory at this point to explain either the Olympics being a security boondoggle, nor a right-wing government imposing ridiculous laws in the name of fighting terrorism. Its happening all over the world, Fukushima or not.
Never mind the fact that the Fukushima disaster was 6 years ago. Which would make them about 6 years too late to bother implementing blackout laws. That means its either not nearly as big of a coverup as you're wanting to believe, or it is a big coverup and existing blackout laws have been working fine. Either way, there is no need to try and use a 2011 disaster to justify a 2017 surveillance bill when there's so many other juicy pseudo-justifications to use.
it seems incredibly difficult to find the text of Japanese laws.
Try http://www.japaneselawtranslation.go.jp/?re=02. I don't know the lag time on the translations though so I can't say how long it will be before this specific law is up. But if you know Japanese, you can go straight to the Ministry of Justice page and I imagine with some digging could find the original Japanese text as well. It would certainly be easier if any of the news sources would bother including the Japanese name for the bill though.
I wonder how long the illusion that these acts of government are in place to serve the people can be maintained.
Sadly, if we look at history this can be a very long time. All it takes is the right propaganda to convince people that you're serving them, and terrorism has given governments around the world a very deep well to draw such propaganda from, as we're all terrified of being the victim of an attack (even though statistically we're far more likely to be done in by a car accident or a peanut allergy or a lightning strike or any of a few dozen other things.)
I wonder when freedom and liberty will stop mattering entirely.
For all? Not sure that's ever existed, though if it did it kind of died out in the McCarthy era and the continual "war" on nouns (communism, crime, drugs, terrorism.. probably missing one or two in there,) and while liberty has rallied a couple times since then, it hasn't really revived. We're pretty good at inventing reasons to oppress people.
Of course that's just in the US. If you take a larger view of the world, there's definitely always been places where freedom and liberty have been unknown concepts for generations.